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Tom Mulcair will be Prime Minister #3
March 30, 2012 - 10:28am
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Wow. This is by far the best review of what happened to the NDP during the leadership race.
And it appears lots of mythology surrounds Mulcair
Behind the scenes of the NDP leadership campaignPitting renewal against tradition, it’s a win for change
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/03/30/a-win-for-change/
The last thing anyone expected from Thomas Mulcair in the race for the NDP leadership was a charm offensive. Sharp debating skills, sure. Divisive messaging, more than likely. But the Quebec MP routinely characterized as a tough customer was hardly thought likely to better his rivals in a contest of interpersonal skills. Yet there he was on the last Saturday of January, a couple of weeks before the watershed point when his dominance of the campaign became clear, winning a potential key new backer over breakfast at Halifax’s venerable Victory Arms Pub.
His quarry that morning was Nova Scotia MP Robert Chisholm, who had entered the leadership race, then dropped out early when he realized his inability to speak French was a fatal shortcoming. A former NDP leader in his home province, Chisholm looked like an obvious high-value target for all the main leadership aspirants. His background as a union leader might have suggested an affinity with fellow labour-movement heavyweights Brian Topp and Peggy Nash. But he told Maclean’s that he received just two “casual” calls from camps other than Mulcair’s. “Really, it was only Tom who reached out,” Chisholm said, “and was interested in following up on a regular basis and seeking my opinion.”
The two had barely known each other before the race, but Mulcair now struck Chisholm as “warm, friendly and engaging.” Not adjectives often publicly associated with the hard-driving Montrealer. On that winter weekend when all the leadership contenders rolled into Halifax for the second of their series of six televised debates, Mulcair and his wife, Catherine Pinhas, arranged breakfast with Chisholm and his wife, Paula Simon. They settled in for a relaxed hour at the pub restaurant on the ground floor of the gracious old Lord Nelson Hotel. “We found them both quite charming,” Chisholm said. After mulling his decision, he announced on March 1 that he was endorsing Mulcair.
I enjoy Wells for his independence of thought in the msp which is rare but he's too much in love with Harper - what ever happened to his NDP girl friend? Why Tom Mulcair is Stephen Harper’s first real Opposition threat in yearsPaul Wells: Get ready for Beethoven vs. Nickelback
http://www2.macleans.ca/2012/03/30/get-ready-for-beethoven-vs-nickelback/
Tom Mulcair is the most experienced opposition leader Stephen Harper has faced. Between Quebec’s national assembly and the federal Parliament, he’s been in elected politics for 18 years. Unlike Paul Martin, who had been in Parliament for nearly as long, Mulcair has been in an opposition party, Jean Charest’s Quebec Liberals, that fought its way to government. He is an effective interrogator of witnesses in parliamentary committees, a skill he should keep using. He’s smart and hungry.
For now, he’s more a danger to Bob Rae than to Stephen Harper.
Some of my colleagues have been tut-tutting Mulcair for reading from notes in his victory speech at the NDP convention and in his first performances in the House of Commons. Here in the Parliamentary press gallery, we like our political leaders spontaneous. It’s why so many of us thought Michael Ignatieff’s town-hall free-association sessions were the highlight of the 2011 election. It helps explain why apparently nobody in 30 years has ever taken Bob Rae aside and said, “Bob? Edit.”
What people in my line of work hate to admit is that what a leader says is more important than how he says it. As soon as he got back to the Commons, Mulcair made a beeline toward economic uncertainty. “Mr. Speaker, since the Conservatives took office, Canada has lost hundreds of thousands of good jobs in the manufacturing sector,” he said. And then: “The Conservatives are saddling future generations with the biggest environmental, economic and social debt in our history. They are gutting the manufacturing sector and destabilizing the balanced economy that we have built up since the Second World War.”
This is so far from the lint-picking self-obsession that characterizes much of current parliamentary debate as to be positively bracing. Following Mulcair, a chastened Rae attempted a me-too line of questioning on the same topics at a louder volume. But his party has pursued a more esoteric line of argument—essentially, that the Harper Conservatives are naughty flouters of proper parliamentary procedure—through a decade of diminishing electoral returns.
So what's the skinny on Raoul Gebert, obviously one of the principal power brokers behind the scenes in the new NDP?
That was a Tom stroke of genius choosing Raoul, and the Raoul results displayed a brilliant sense of political acumen within the NDP
Also will power within the NDP now shift more to the regions such as Quebec, Atlantic Canada, BC, the Prairies, etc?
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/Stephen+Harper+communications+direct...
Raoul did a phenomenal job. Really nice guy, too!
Yes. Tom was very specific throughout the campaign that he wanted to do the same thing in each of the regions that we did in Québec, i.e. tailoring our message and strategy to specific regions. Since Jack, we've seen the benefit that central campaigns have over the disparate completely ad hoc local campaigns we used to run in creating strong branding. Now is the time to start re-decentralizing to ensure that our message is better tailored to success in the regions; to start re-building the local/regional branding.
When he was out here in Winnipeg, Tom strongly enphasized improving the organizational heft of the Party everywhere. He wants to bring in skilled and experienced organizers in all of the regions/provinces and get to work building strong, well-funded and viable riding associations. We definitely have that experience all over the country: it is simply a matter of finding the right people and getting them to work. The 338 project will be a great start towards building capacity. Let's face it, the more Tories we can keep in Alberta defending their own turf, the fewer there will be available to fight us elsewhere.
Does anyone know if the rift between Mulcair and Davies has been at all repaired?
I think they've both turned the page. Something we all should do.
Bravo Boom Boom!
Clap, clap.
Now do we know if these assertions are true?
Signs mount that Canada's government is beholden to a religious agenda averse to science and rational debate.
http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2012/03/26/Harper-Evangelical-Mission/
Beware 'the new hypocrite'
In a 2010 interview, Gushee, a brilliant and passionate Christian, detailed the basic tenets of "evangelical climate skepticism." He said there were seven main points and argued that they had poisoned the Republican Party. These tenets not only explain startling developments in Canada but should raise the hair on the neck of every thinking citizen regardless of their faith:
1. Disdain for the environmental movement
2. Distrust of mainstream science in general
3. Distrust of the mainstream media
4. Loyalty to the party
5. Libertarian economics as God's will (God is opposed to government regulation or taxation
6. Misunderstanding of divine sovereignty (God won't allow us to ruin creation)
7. Unreconstructed Dominion theology (God calls on humans to subdue and rule creation)
In the end of the interview, Gushee summarized the purpose of this new evangelical Republicanism: "God is sovereign over creation and therefore humans can do no permanent damage... God established government for limited purposes and government should not intervene much in the workings of a free market economy... The media is overplaying climate change worries... The environmental movement is secular/pagan and has always been a threat to American liberties...
"Nice worldview, huh? I disagree with just about every word of it."
But that Republican religious tribalism is now Ottawa's worldview.
Readers looking for a thoughtful analysis on Harper and the rise of libertarian religious tribalism in Canada should pick up Marci McDonald's The Armageddon Factor.
Another touchstone might be G.K. Chesterton, a radical Catholic, who regularly questioned the wealth and power of big government and business decades ago.
He would have advised us to get to the bottom of whether our prime minister is pretending to be just a wonkish politician while pursuing an extreme Republican evangelical agenda.
"The old hypocrite was a man whose aims were really worldly and practical, while he pretended that they were religious," the radical Catholic once observed. "The new hypocrite is one whose aims are really religious, while he pretends that they are worldly and practical."
Canada needs to have an open conversation about the virtues of democracy over theocracy.
I enjoyed reading this in the TO Star
“It is clear that the election of Thomas Mulcair as NDP leader has considerably improved the party’s prospects,” Forum Research president Lorne Bozinoff said in a statement.
Plenty of meat in here for the NDP both federally and provincially in Ontario, but get used to a resourse-based economy, because that is Canada's future and where we are headed as a society. Those that haven't or don't grasp that unfortunately have already been left, or will be left seriously behind in the financial scheme of things.
Stephen Harper, Dalton McGuinty on similar trackshttp://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1154283--hebert-step...
Like today’s Conservatives, the Liberals cut the CBC budget. For years, they paid little more than lip service to the environment, the military and foreign aid.
But through it all, the economic ball the Chrétien/Martin Liberals had their eyes fixed on was one that rolled through the manufacturing sector of Ontario and — to a lesser degree — Quebec.
In the outlook of the Harper government, Central Canada in its capacity as an economic engine mostly appears in the rear-view mirror. It is only central in geographical terms
In the big picture, what lies under the ground mostly in energy-rich Western Canada has become more important to the country’s prosperity than what is manufactured over the ground mostly in Ontario.
There have always been competing economies in Canada and at times their needs have conflicted.
But in the past, Ontario had always held the bigger end of the stick. Thursday’s federal budget confirms that the government no longer sees the economic future of the country mostly through the prism of its largest provinces.
Over the past 25 years, no federal budget has ever given as large a place to the expansion of the resource-based economy.
The Flaherty budget all but defines the national interest in terms of the capacity of Canada to exploit and market its resources. And it signals that Harper will marshal the considerable means of the federal government to achieve that objective.
That includes a smaller environment department, a substantial reduction in environment oversight as assessments of large-scale projects is speeded up and a systematic effort to diminish the impact of the pro-environment lobby.
Non-profit groups will have their advocacy spending scrutinized with an eye to withdrawing their charitable status if they are judged to have spent too much time in the political trenches. And the National Round Table on the Economy and the Environment will be eliminated.
In total, the Flaherty budget may be the least green federal budget in decades.
Harper is not the first prime minister to state that he wants Canada to be an energy superpower — Martin also used to say that — but the Conservative Prime Minister is the first to put his political will so squarely behind that proposition.
When all is said and done, the aggressive pursuit of a more resource-based economy is what most distinguishes this majority budget from the previous Conservative installments. If it had been brought to a minority Parliament, it is that section of the budget and not the cuts to the civil service that the opposition parties would ultimately have choked on.
That being said, over the six years the Conservatives have been in power and in the wake of the global economic crisis, there is no escaping the fact that the equation between more prosperity and more resource development has become a dominant factor in the budget calculations of much of the country.
These days in Canada, the top provincial performers all reap the dividends of that equation. And some of the laggers are looking to it for salvation.
Take Quebec — a province that likes to brag about its green credentials. The centrepiece of its March budget was the Plan Nord, a multi-billion-dollars bid by Charest to tap the resources of the undeveloped northernmost areas of the province. To sustain its social safety net, Quebec’s Liberal government is turning to projected increases in revenues from its natural resources.
When it comes to squeezing savings from the government, Harper and McGuinty have ended up on the same budget page but when it comes to generating wealth, the Prime Minister is travelling on a route more similar to Charest’s
For all that, it would be an overstatement to say that Harper’s path to prosperity is strikingly different from McGuinty’s. Ontario’s roadmap to generating wealth from the unfamiliar wrong side of the Canadian economic track is still a work in progress.
I read twitter says NDP against Bill 310 is it true? I notice Francois Boivin says it is not true. im confuse
What is bill 310?
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There was so much BS pedaled here about Tom it was unbelievable to say the least. At least now the second part (the first part being the highly successful results for Layton-led NDP in the last federal election), of the NDP taking Harper down, and forming the Canadian government is over. Now it is on to the third and final act as they say in show business.
Maybe a new world really is possible under Mulcairhttp://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/gerald-capla...
But then came March 2012. Naturally the media was happy to peddle Liberal spin that their candidate in the by-election to replace Jack Layton was coming on strong. It had seemed that New Democratic contender Craig Scott – law professor, international human rights activist, a real prize for the NDP and for parliament – was a shoo-in. Suddenly it appeared there was a real chance for an upset. Some upset. Mr. Scott won walking away, doubling the Liberal vote; the Conservative were missing in action. As it happened, the NDP leadership convention was only four days away.
But first new polling numbers emerged. For months we had heard that the party in the House of Commons had disappeared, its interim leader submerged by the ubiquitous Bob Rae. Yet almost a year after their majority government victory, the Harperites had lost a quarter of their support and were now at 30 per cent, the Liberals had stayed put at a derisory 20 per cent, and the NDP was still at 30 per cent. The party was tied with the badly slumping Conservatives for first place!
Even more remarkably, and all but unprecedented, 49 per cent of all Canadians now believe the NDP can be trusted with government. In fact, that can be said more positively: Half of Canadians believe an NDP government would be good for Canada! Another 20 per cent are unsure, making them potential supporters. It seems the very fact of being Official Opposition means a party is taken more seriously as an alternative government. Now you can’t exactly say with a straight face the NDP is rushing headlong towards government with up to 70 per cent of the vote. But still, whoever anticipated such a breakthrough?
The convention held its own traps and snares. Would the party select the obvious best candidate – the one who would consolidate Quebec, leave Bob Rae with a dead parrot for a party, and make the Conservatives supremely anxious? Here again the media set us up for the inevitable bad news. With a cock-and-bull story that Thomas Mulcair wanted to sell out the great dream of social democracy, he kept being painted as some kind of Manchurian candidate smuggled in by the 1 per cent. At the same time, given the almost indecent respect and civility the leadership candidates had showed each other throughout, the media naturally gave tons of ink to the rare outbursts against the front-runner.
twitter Wai Young conservative mp of BC says
#NDP votes against #CPC @MPJoySmith Bill C310 to tackle human trafficking + modern-day slavery. Shameful. #cdnpoli
So let's find out the reason why from a more unbiased source perhaps?
From that article:
Although a neoconservative, neoliberal ideologue, I have doubts he is a religious ideologue.
Harper has the outward show of religious trappings but who knows if he is actually a believer any more than that great atheist mobilizer of the Christian right, Karl Rove.
Harper was never a product of a particularly fundamentalist family or school system. For someone who has a well-developed sense of ambitious cunning to come to such faith in his later life is possible, but questionable. Harper is known as a ruthless manipulator of any ideology or special interest that will advance his career and his agenda.
From Macleans:
http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20060220_121848_121848&source...
Either way, sociopathic manipulator or true believer, it doesn't bode well for the remnants of Canada.
Obviously the Conservatives don't get that an economy based on non-renewable resources is by definition unsustainable, as is an economy based on the unsustainable use of renewable resources.
It's not a very good future. A good future is not in hauling stuff out of the ground and sending it elsewhere. It's in increasing value-added. That can go with natural resources (see here for something about using processed wood as a material for constructing tall buildings) but it doesn't have to. There's the rather large problem that Montreal, Toronto or Vancouver and their suburbs just can't be another Calgary because the resources aren't there. The strategy that flows from their economic position and needs looks more like that of Singapore than Saudi Arabia.
What gain is there in opposing the Human Trafficing motion? Personally, I have always been a bit suspicious of the right wing jumping on board this issue but I am curious to hear the reasoning from the NDP.
Courtesy www.warrenkinsella.com
When all three of these winners, er losers, tell you the same thing then it probably is a good idea after all.
No kidding he opposes it.
Stephane Dion Nixes The Notion of a Centre-Left MergerAnd so does he.
Ignatieff rules out merger, coalition; says he’s in it to win.
http://www.vancouversun.com/Ignatieff+insists+race/4683381/story.html
and he as well.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/bob-rae-sco...
Liberal loving Yaffe can't get over the fact her beloved Liberals are a distant 3rd place party.It's long past time to make some wholesale changes in today reporters for the mainstream press, so that they will report on things that relate to the 21st century, as opposed to the 19th. It's time for some of these journalists to wake up as too many of these folks are dinasaurs in their thinking processes. Harper has little to fear from Mulcair
http://www.calgaryherald.com/news/Harper+little+fear+from+Mulcair/639070...
Boo Hoo Bob, it looks good on you, and also who do you think you're kidding.
Excellent NDP approach to this.
Mulcair's NDP moves to reclaim spotlight from Liberals, hog debate timehttp://www.680news.com/news/national/article/346303--mulcair-s-ndp-moves...
"Listen, we're the official Opposition. We take our role seriously," said associate NDP finance critic Robert Chisholm.
"We have a job to do as the official Opposition to hold the government to account, to point out the flaws in the things that they're doing and we're going to take that seriously and we're going to work as hard as we can to stand up for Canadians."
Government House leader Peter Van Loan agreed that the NDP was simply following the rules for budget debate.
As for Rae's complaint, Van Loan said: "Well, I see lots of evidence all around that Bob Rae is feeling a lot of pressure and is pretty frustrated."
On Monday, Rae was rudely abandoned during a scrum as journalists rushed to capture Mulcair's remarks following his first question period as leader.
Mulcair hasn't been leader for a week yet but there are already signs that the NDP is under new management, one that is ultra-sensitive to the leader's home base, Quebec.
On Thursday, Mulcair's office issued two separate news releases on the budget — one aimed specifically at Quebecers, the other at Canadians generally.
It wasn't that there were budget measures that applied uniquely to Quebec, or that Mulcair had anything particularly different to say to Quebecers. The message in both releases was essentially the same.
A spokesman for Mulcair said the leader would be issuing other "regional" releases about the budget but those did not materialize until Friday.
La Presse has an article about the Mulcair-Charest/PLQ relationship. Most of the article is about the falling-out between the two, and it is largely favourable to Mulcair. Not much new is revealed, apart from very inside-baseball anecdotes about the internal dealings of cabinet.
As for where things stand now between Mulcair and Charest, this excerpt seems like an apt summary:
My translation:
I am telling you right now, Trudeau is going to be picked the next Lib leader, they are desperate, Huff Po Headline:
"Justin Trudeau Rejects Merger With NDP, Won't 'Turn Away' From Eventual Leadership Run"So just how big a threat is he? I am guessing he'll say the NDP loves the sepratists, opposes the Clarity Act, and we have to elect Trudeaus's kid to save Canada. How close am I to be right and how does Tom deal with this? Is Turdeau going to be able to get by using just charm?